Rounding out the top three finalists was the new Chevrolet Volt and new Toyota Prius.

“The TOYOTA MIRAI was chosen from an initial entry list of eight new vehicles from all over the world, then a short list of three finalists that included the winner as well as the Chevrolet Volt and the Toyota Prius Hybrid.

To be eligible for the 2016 World Green Car award, a vehicle had to be all-new, or substantially revised, in production and introduced for sale or lease to the public in quantities of at least 10 in at least one major market during the period beginning January 1, 2015 and ending May 31, 2016. Tailpipe emissions, fuel consumption, and use of a major advanced power plant technology (beyond engine componentry), aimed specifically at increasing the vehicle’s environmental responsibility, were all taken into consideration.

Vehicles in all award categories are selected and voted on by an international jury panel comprised of 73 top-level automotive journalists from 23 countries around the world. Each juror was appointed by the World Car Steering Committee on the basis of his or her expertise, experience, credibility, and influence. Each juror typically drives and evaluates new vehicles on a regular basis as part of their professional work. Through their respective outlets they collectively reach an audience of many millions world-wide. The international accounting firm KPMG tabulates the jurors’ ballots.”

2016 Toyota Prius Is A “Green” Product More Familiar To The Consumer

Those three models left behind:

BMW 330e Plug-in-hybrid

Volkswagen Passat GTE

Mercedes-Benz C350 e

Nissan Murano Hybrid

Nissan X-Trail Hybrid

In reviewing the list, we aren’t quite sure how the Model X didn’t make the qualification cut – perhaps due to its technically “not available to the public” status in 2016 (outside of limited Signature/Founder series cars), but then again – World Green Car Awards.

The green joke of the yr maybe? If you can’t sell a car because it uses $14/gal/kg fuel, how green can it be?
In fact it uses 4x’s the energy/mile of an EV again makes it not green.
And it is especially not green because it wastes resources that could be used for real green vehicles.

Totally bought competition. This one is all about auto journalists rewarding advertisers. Most of these press release Awards… are completely bought. Model X would have been great choice… but they buy NO ADS. Seems like obvious connection. Isn’t crapitalism wonderful?

Under Federal law high pressure hydrogen tanks must be inspected every so many years. After a fixed date it will be a violation of Federal law in the US to add hydrogen to one of these Japanese Edsels.

Sorry, I was under the impression the main way we’ll be making the fuel cells is from electrolysis which has nothing to do with methane, please correct me if I’m wrong? So in theory if the power plant used to drive the process is renewably-powered, then it’s zero-emission.

Except for the fact it’s still a very energy-intensive process, so at the end of the day you’re still wasting energy that could be used elsewhere.

Electrolysis is an EXTREMELY inefficient way to generate hydrogen. Given a solar or similar renewable plant, you are far better off running that power over the grid and/or storing it, then using it to drive BEVs.

Which comes back to the point. BEV is the only vehicle that has the actual ability, as in now, today, to deliver ZEVs, as opposed to the Mr home fusion reactor, space and time travel future.

“Sorry, I was under the impression the main way we’ll be making the fuel cells is from electrolysis which has nothing to do with methane…”

That’s part of the greenwashing campaign that “hydrogen economy” supporters use. They keep wanting to talk only about hydrogen generated by electrolysis.

The truth is that 95% of commercially sold hydrogen fuel comes from reforming natural gas. Electrolysis is much too expensive and inefficient to be used for large-scale production. This is a direct result of basic laws of physics, so it that reality can never significantly change… despite what the proponents of the “hydrogen economy” keep claiming.

Now you’re making the same “long tailpipe” argument used by petroleum advocates to disparage BEVs.

The bottom line is that the Mirai, like the Leaf or Model S, is a zero emission vehicle. Is the hydrogen fuel frequently produced from hydrocarbons? Sure, in exactly the same sense that lots of grid electricity is generated from hydrocarbons.

That does not diminish the significance of reducing local air pollution, nor does it reduce the significance of having fuel generated by large, extremely efficient industrial plants rather than combusted in tiny individual engines.

Not to disagree with most of your points, but the fuel cell itself is only about 50% efficient. Certainly a lot better than an ICEngine, but not nearly as efficient at using energy stored onboard the car as is a battery pack.

But this award is missing a big point that is fuel cell vehicles produce vapour water as we can see easily in Iceland streets, for example, with fuel cell bus expelling clouds of vapour water. Now, we know that vapour water is even than CO2 for green house effect.
But what to expect from a auto show organised by car dealers except trying to promote vehicles which fuel come from fossil fuel at 96% and which is a very complicated vehicle, what is cool for car dealers because it will have a lot of parts to repair and replace. So business as usual.

Careful. Don’t fall into the same logical fallacies as global warming deniers and EV critics.

Water vapor is a more potent green house gas, but the atmosphere is already effectivly saturated with water and it doesn’t stick around and accumulate for years like CO2 does.

FCEVs climate impacts are all in how H2 is made. Making H2 has a high opportunity cost (could be using the power to offset coal or charge an EV), FCEVs are inefficient needing lots of H2, and compression uses even more energy which is wasted as overhead.

“Don’t fall into the same logical fallacies as global warming deniers and EV critics.”

Isn’t that what climate change deniers say, that 90% of green house gas is water vapor and that adding tiny bit CO2 have virtually no effect? Whether water vapor cycles is immaterial as the total content remains the same while more GHG is added via CO2.

MMF, but EV’s only use 25% of the energy/mile so from the same electric source, EV’s are far, far better.
And the future all energy will be clean simply because it costs
less.
Even as we speak coal plants are shutting at a very fast rate and most new power is solar, wind, nuke with an old one finally finished and another 4 unit coming online forced paid for by the ratepayers and given to the utilities free of cost, risk as corporate welfare by repub
state govs.
And H2 won’t be because of it’s basic physics will cost $14/gal/kg now and not much less in the future, EV’s
easily win.

“Don’t release the Model ☰! Release a Volt competitor” paraphrased according to Bob Lutz. I think Matthew Askari was right to quote Bob Lutz and write the article. It’s not that I think Bob Lutz is right, it’s that Matthew spotted a monumental commentary and made sure we all knew about it.

Considering that there’s a spreadsheet right now to track how many people are camping out overnight to order their Model ☰ at stores this Thursday, and at least one writer has done a projection of 100,000 potential orders by day’s end (a single day where Tesla Motors receives $100M in deposits), I’d say that Matthew was a good juror pick. He knows what is going on and isn’t afraid to write about it.

I think the question remains as to how a qualified green car journalist such as Matthew voted.

Do I think the Mirai sold ten vehicles in a market? Yes. Do I think they sold 100? No. In fact, they had a cease and desist message to an auto dealer in California to that effect. The Mirai runs on refined petrochemicals, in the form of hydrogen. That is the cheapest way they can manufacture hydrogen. The most expensive way they can manufacture hydrogen is to drive a pickup-truck to a farm, collect manure, drive it to a refinery of sorts, fill up a pressurized tank, then drive that tank to a hydrogen pumping station and fill that pump. Really green. Wow. How many miles of driving are involved in producing one mile of hydrogen range, at the pump?

Believe it or not, it can be even more wasteful and expensive than that! According to a post sven made here some months back, when Toyota made their “Fueled by Bullsh!t” video, the manure that was supposedly used to create the hydrogen was collected on a West Coast dairy farm, using a diesel-powered front-loader, driven to a methane collection plant in a pickup, and then the methane was trucked cross-country to an east coast refinery for conversion to hydrogen… followed by which the hydrogen was trucked to (if I recall correctly) Georgia for filming the commercial!

::triple facepalm::

If Guinness had a category for “least efficient, most wasteful way to generate usable energy”…

Wouldn’t it be far better to use hydrogen in large scale uses, like powering ships or for large scale energy storage? Using it in a passenger vehicle, considering all the crap you have to go through to get it, seems horribly wasteful.